Songfacts®:

• "Barbra Streisand" - the song, not the singer - was huge in dance clubs across Europe when it was released in 2010. The song isn't about Streisand and has nothing to do with the singer; it's just that her name fit into the track and she came to mind when the two members of Duck Sauce - DJs A-Trak and Armand Van Helden - were building it.
  
  "It's just something that we thought would make people laugh," A-Trak told NPR. "We were brainstorming what to add to the track and we just came up with this idea that it'd be funny to say someone's name... The thing about Barbra Streisand is it just had the right cadence for that little opening in the music."
• The track is built around a sample from Boney M's 1979 hit "Gotta Go Home" that was looped, with the vocal "Barbra Streisand" used as an interstitial to break up the repeating "Woo-ooh, ooh-hoo, ooh-hoo, ooh-hoo."
  
  Boney M, in turn, got those "Woo-oohs" and the riff from a 1973 song called "Hallo Bimmelbahn" by the German band Nighttrain. So we essentially have a sample of a sample.
  
  The credited writers on the end product are the writers of "Hallo Bimmelbahn" along with the writers of "Gotta Go Home" (including Frank Farian, the Boney M impresario who later gave us Milli Vanilli) and the Duck Sauce DJs.
• Barbra Streisand, a legendary singer and actress whose hits include "The Way We Were," and "Woman In Love," seemed bemused by this song. She played the video during intermissions on her 2012 tour.
• Among the musicians who appear in the song's music video are Pharrell Williams, Ryan Leslie, Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, Kanye West, Questlove and, Santigold (there's also a Barbra Streisand lookalike). Most of the cameos showed up at the request of A-Trak, who called in some favors. "These are all people that I've met at one point or another in my career and established some sort of relationship with," he told NPR. "This was the video where I called in all the favors at once."
• The cover art is a line drawing of a couple with duck beaks in an embrace. It's a send-up of Barbra Streisand's 1980 album Guilty, where she's seen embracing Barry Gibb.
• The song was a hit throughout Europe, topping the charts in Belgium, the Netherlands and Finland. It also reached #1 on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Songs tally. In America it did well in clubs but only reached #89.
• A-Trak and Armand Van Helden are both very popular DJs, particularly Van Helden, who had a #1 UK hit with "You Don't Know Me" in 1999 and another with his Dizzee Rascal collaboration "Bonkers" in 2009.
• Duck Sauce formed in 2009, their name taken from the contiment that's often supplied with take-out Chinese food. Van Helden is from Boston and A-Trak from Canada, but they got together in New York City, where they did most of their work. Their first single was "aNYway" (note the "NY" for New York) in 2009. "Barbra Streisand" followed in 2010; they debuted it at the Miami Winter Music Conference.
• Asked if he was a Barbra Streisand fan, A-Trak (real name Alain Macklovitch) replied: "Yeah, to a certain extent. Sure. As any Jew would be."